MYST 199: Holiday Survival Guide

When people are on a weight loss journey, the winter holiday season is often viewed as a gauntlet of slow death. Oh, the parties and food are wonderful, but the bathroom scale often reflects gains and as a result, feelings of self-recrimination, despair, guilt, and depression pollute the underlying mood of the season.

I have one piece of advice:

STOP IT!

Yes, you actually are in control of your emotions. You are letting a few days of the year wreck all the positive progress from earlier in the year, and set you off with a negative mindset as you enter the new year. That is a plan for disaster. (And you know I’m right, because you’ve done that in the past.)

Ignore those parties. Or rather, enjoy them! Spend time with your friends and family. Eat! Drink! (Don’t drink and drive.) And stop worrying about those few days. The reality is that you probably have between five and ten events between the US Thanksgiving and New Year’s where you are likely to exceed your calorie budget.

That’s it. Just five or ten meals. If you eat three meals a day, you eat 1,095 meals a year. Are you really going to let ten meals (mathematically, that is 0.9% of all the meals in a year) turn you into an emotional and dietary wreck?

I hope not. It’s not the smart option.

What you should do is to do as I always say: eat the foods you really love and try to eat controlled portions. If you exceed your budget, don’t sweat it. This is a lifelong journey. We need to be able to have fun while still making progress towards our goals.

Not my Christmas meal, but doesn’t that look appealing?

I hope you have a safe, happy and wonderful holiday season! And come back next week for episode 200!

Voiceover courtesy of Matt Young. Matt is a professional voiceover artist. If you have any need of voice-over work, for your podcast, radio spot, or whatever, you can reach Matt by a variety of methods. He is on LinkedIn. On Twitter. And Google+. Follow his Facebook page to learn how to better use social media. Matt was also my guest on MYST 54. Give his story a listen.